Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Spreading love & lessons on armpit hair

Despite the fact that all women have armpit hair, it’s hard to find one who wears it with pride. I recently came to an interesting realization: I’ve NEVER had armpit hair. As soon as it began to grow in, I was already shaving it off, and I’ve never let it grow longer than about 1.5 cm (after a week in the mountains with no razor!). So, why do women spend so much time, effort and money shaving (or waxing) what Mother Nature gave us?

Prior to World War I, most women only worried about the hair that could be seen; hair on the scalp, and for some, facial hair. Around 1915 however, fashions changed and sleeveless dresses came into style. And so began The Great Underarm Campaign – whereby companies that made razors sought to inform American women of a problem they didn’t know they had: unsightly underarm hair.

The campaign began with an ad in the May 1915 issue of Harper’s Bazaar magazine. The ad featured a young woman in a toga-like dress. Her arms are arched over her head revealing perfectly smooth armpits. The first part of the ad reads, “Summer Dress and Modern Dancing combine to make necessary the removal of objectionable hair.”

Around the same time this ad ran, Wilkinson Sword launched a marketing campaign for razors aimed at women, and within two years sales of razor blades had doubled.

The advertisers succeeded in convincing women that armpit hair was unattractive. They used an advertising technique that is still hugely successful today: invent a problem and then offer your product as the solution. It’s commonly used in anti-wrinkle cream advertising, for example. It doesn’t get much more natural than wrinkles, but advertisers have millions of us convinced that (a) they’re a problem, and (b) we can “cure” them with creams and botox injections.

So, we know why most of us shave off our pit hair, but are there any good reasons to grow it? There are plenty of reasons not to, the least of which being that you’re likely to be called a femi-nazi, man-hating lesbian, angry hairy bitch, or some other cruel name. (I mean, seriously? All that anger over a few wisps of hair!? Get over it, people!)

Well, here’s one reason why you might want to consider growing it back. In one of the most popular and trusted books on sex, The Joy of Sex by Alex Comfort, the authour makes such a strong case for female armpit hair that I had to share it here.

“The natural perfume of a clean woman [is] her greatest sexual asset after her beauty (some would say greater than that). It comes from the whole of her – hair, skin, breasts, armpits, genitals and the clothing she has worn…[some women] chop off their armpit hair, or did until a new generation started to realize that it was sexy. This might be forgivable in a hot climate with no plumbing. Now it is simply ignorant vandalism… A woman’s little tufts [are the] antennae and powderpuffs to introduce herself in a room, or in lovemaking.”

And it’s true… humans are attracted to each other on a primal level by the way we smell. Your own unique smell is an extremely powerful force, and armpit hair is there to capture it.

Despite my awareness of how ridiculous it is that women shave their pits, I still do it. It’s a social norm that’s extremely hard to break away from. But after reading about armpit hair in The Joy of Sex, I have to admit I’m tempted to give pit hair a chance! “Little tufts”… “Powderpuffs”… Why, it sounds simply delightful! And despite what the media tells us, there are plenty of folks – both men and women – who find the au natural style very attractive.

Whatever your preference for pit hair may be – bushy or bare – I think we all need to respect the choices of others. We shouldn’t be disgusted by women who grow bushy little powderpuffs, and we shouldn’t assume anything about their sexuality, anger levels, involvement in feminism, or anything else! And for those of us who shave or wax, we need our hairy sisters to understand that most of us won’t ever go there, mostly because we’ve been so brainwashed to think it’s unattractive and we’re terrified of what other people might think.

6 comments:

I fully agree with the sentiment of this article. In America in particular women who grow armpit hair are considered dirty. Europe takes a much more sensible approach. In Germany in particular a woman with armpit hair is respected as an intelligent, confident woman who has not been brainwashed by society.

It is little short of vandalism when at puberty girls are expected to remove body hair and many shave off pubic hair as they have been brainwashed to believe that men are not attracted to hairy women

God put the hair there for a purpose, to drain sweat and to attract men. Ladies should take a lesson from Julia Roberts and realise that they are even more attractive with body hair.

Ladies throw away the razors and grow all your body hair with pride and do not be ashamed to display it.

Women who have never shaved any part of their bodies should be admired and respected. Few men would want their wives to shave anything.

It was my original comments that prompted misty horizon to start the poll. She was convinced that no men would date a woman with hairy armpits. She associates hair with poor hygene. She does not accept the results of her own poll.

Be natural ladies and be confident in displaying your womanhood. Do not shave or trim the bikini area and be proud to wear a bikini. Men will respect you for being natural.

Hairs are to human beings what vegetation is to our planet Earth. Women are the basic human beings as representatives of earth and procreate both gendered human bodies. Hence natural hair during procreative age is highly essential as a Divine design and cannot be mutilated with mindful opposites as we have no copy or patent rights over natural human form which we may claim with synthetic sub-creation using intellectual intelligence. We have to pay for our rights with ecological imbalances but cannot mutilate women with false aesthetics what nature created out of necessity and delivered our male human forms.

Yeah, no thanks. If you ladies want to convince yourselves that most guys are turned on by armpit hair, then you deserve the guy who passes gas during a meal and then argues that it's not healthy to hold it in. If you really believe men are drawn to body oder, then you deserve the idiot who dishes up plenty of body oder for you to enjoy. As a guy, I can assure you that your poll results are inaccurate. Some guys have hair fetishes, of course, but the average guy wants to be with a woman who grooms herself and wishes to smell like something other than body sweat.